Friday, September 4th 2015
AMD Radeon R9 Nano Review by TPU...Not
There won't be a Radeon R9 Nano review on TechPowerUp. AMD says that it has too few review samples for the press. When AMD first held up the Radeon R9 Nano at its "Fiji" GPU unveil, to us it came across as the most promising product based on the chip, even more than the R9 Fury series, its dual-GPU variant, and the food-processor-shaped SFF gaming desktop thing. The prospect of "faster than R9 290X at 175W" is what excited us the most, as that would disrupt NVIDIA's GM204 based products. Unfortunately, the most exciting product by AMD also has the least amount of excitement by AMD itself.
The first signs of that are, AMD making it prohibitively expensive at $650, and not putting it in the hands of the press, for a launch-day review. We're not getting one, and nor do some of our friends on either sides of the Atlantic. AMD is making some of its tallest claims with this product, and it's important (for AMD) that some of those claims are put to the test. A validated product could maybe even convince some to reach for their wallets, to pull out $650.
Are we sourgraping? You tell us. We're one of the few sites that give you noise testing by some really expensive and broad-ranged noise-testing equipment, and more importantly, card-only power-draw. Our reviews also grill graphics cards through 22 real-world tests across four resolutions, each, and offer price-performance graphs. When NVIDIA didn't send us a GeForce GTX TITAN-Z sample, we didn't care. We didn't make an announcement like this. At $2,999, it was just a terrible product and we never wished it was part of our graphs. Its competing R9 295X2 could be had under $700, and so it continues to top our performance charts.
The R9 Nano, on the other hand, has the potential for greatness. Never mind the compact board design and its SFF credentials. Pull out this ASIC, put it on a normal 20-25 cm PCB, price it around $350, and dual-slot cooling that can turn its fans off in idle, and AMD could have had a GM204-killing product. Sadly, there's no way for us to test that, either. We can't emulate an R9 Nano on an R9 Fury X. The Nano appears to have a unique power/temperature based throttling algorithm that we can't copy.
"Fiji" is a good piece of technology, but apparently, very little effort is being made to put it into the hands of as many people as possible (and by that we mean consumers). This is an incoherence between what AMD CEO stated at the "Fiji" unveil, and what her company is doing. It's also great disservice to the people who probably stayed up many nights to get the interposer design right, or sailing through uncharted territory with HBM. Oh well.
The first signs of that are, AMD making it prohibitively expensive at $650, and not putting it in the hands of the press, for a launch-day review. We're not getting one, and nor do some of our friends on either sides of the Atlantic. AMD is making some of its tallest claims with this product, and it's important (for AMD) that some of those claims are put to the test. A validated product could maybe even convince some to reach for their wallets, to pull out $650.
The R9 Nano, on the other hand, has the potential for greatness. Never mind the compact board design and its SFF credentials. Pull out this ASIC, put it on a normal 20-25 cm PCB, price it around $350, and dual-slot cooling that can turn its fans off in idle, and AMD could have had a GM204-killing product. Sadly, there's no way for us to test that, either. We can't emulate an R9 Nano on an R9 Fury X. The Nano appears to have a unique power/temperature based throttling algorithm that we can't copy.
"Fiji" is a good piece of technology, but apparently, very little effort is being made to put it into the hands of as many people as possible (and by that we mean consumers). This is an incoherence between what AMD CEO stated at the "Fiji" unveil, and what her company is doing. It's also great disservice to the people who probably stayed up many nights to get the interposer design right, or sailing through uncharted territory with HBM. Oh well.
759 Comments on AMD Radeon R9 Nano Review by TPU...Not
Whats the guess the coil whine was the reason TPU didn't get one - w1zzy would never let that slide.
pretty sure all the other "fair" homebrew reviewers get this kind of exposure, right? RIGHT?
thanks @amd_roy for single-handedly ruining amds reputation even further, thus loosing customers to a company that isnt exactly doing well in its finances department. the most "fair" route now would not be handing out cards to all reviewers, but dr lisa to kick your ass to the curb (hope you dont have little kids that need the income, but you brought this uppon yourself).
people have no honor or code of conduct anymore, customers cant trust anyone in the tech business anymore (or any other business for that matter), what a shame and a let down
- TPU I like performance summary , noise , lot of games , closer look inside GPU
- Techreport and PCPer hardwork on frame time
- Guru3D thermal image camera. Very few site investigate GPU VRM temp
- HardOCP maximum image quality of each game that you can expect from card , very hardwork on OC , OC vs OC ,
- Anandtech deep explanation , one of very few site that include stategy game
- Tomshardware hardwork on power consumption test
So sorry that TPU , Techreport , HardOCP don't get sample. :cry:
Well, coil whine must be awful - does every reviewer have it? This is Hexus review.
hexus.net/tech/reviews/graphics/86042-amd-radeon-r9-nano/?page=12And given how many reviews there are - it was most definitely a cherry picking.
If i wrote a review and said it was 'kick ass' - that would also be a colloquialism. Saying it's not 'professional' is not appropriate for a privately owned review site. Language is a very flexible tool and can be used to many ends. Using the term "AMD is fucked" implies that the reviewed Nvidia card basically ripped AMD's nuts off in a commercial sense. And it did - sales stats have shown the growing gulf.
As for our seeming TPU meta review - here's what is telling from Guru3D - apart from saying of course that it is a great little card (which it is):Nano is meant for SFF living room stuff. So $100 extra dollars for it to be 30fps + on your HDTV. That connectivity oversight was really dumb. Also, Hilbert made it a very obvious point to state it has coil whine (and it's as loud as a Titan Z unless you ace your mini ITX case cooling).
After reading 3 reviews (Hexus, Guru3D and Anandtech, here is an unbiased summary:
Positive
Best performing ITX card by a good margin (leaves the 970 mini trailing). For a little more noise and 18% more power it performs about 30-35% better
Negative
Costs as much as a Fury X
Isn't as quiet as hoped for (if Guru says it, it means something - see my earlier posts in this thread)
Not ideal for HDTV use due to poor output connector choice.
Coil Whine being flagged up at most sites
Summary
Taking the Fiji core and showing how much power can exist in small package (all down to HBM) - but it begs the question, why the hell didn't AMD strap a good fan on Fury X? However, the intended market for SFF and HDTV is seriously let down by the connection choice from AMD (why AMD, why!). To get the required output of fps for 4k you really need two and that then brings in the cheaper option of a standard Fury as an ITX case won't support crossfire.
Nano is a powerful card for it's size but for it's cost it's already a strange design. Too slow for 4k on it's own and too expensive to justify for 1080p or 1440p (when a cheaper, quieter 970 mini will suffice - if you could find one). You want to crossfire them - get a bigger mobo and case, hell, just get two Fury's.
Interesting card but ultimately a bit lost.
Please all and sundry check the retail specs online. Both Scan and OcUK are rating it as 1000Mhz. Not 'up to' but simply 1000Mhz.
As Hexus say:Is this the retailer or AMD's choice because as reported in reviews - 850-900 is it's operating range. Shall we call this evens on the 3.5Gb memory of the 970?
EDIT: please look at my location description
I'd like to see ATI rise like a pheonix, with a Canadian accent. Not sure why - I like the idea of a Canadian tech company blazing forward.